Tuknuk is right. Acrobat writer is not cheap… but once you have it, you are adicted…
I output all of my invoices with it, then email them to clients.
can you say Deeeee Duck table?
:beam:
Rev
*Originally posted by SureShot *
**Lava - I disagree totally.
Adobe Acrobat is one of the most powerfull apps out there, that’s why so many companies are using them. I work as a Graphic Designer / Web Developer for a company here in London. Everytime I send anything to a print house for output they insist it be a .pdf file. This is because of not only the drastically reduced file size but the stability and quality of the format.
When working with Illustrator or Photoshop just save your document as a .eps and use Acrobat Distiller that comes with a retail version of Acrobat to produce the file. It’s as easy as drag and drop. You can control what kind of quality your file will be in every aspect imaginable. It’s a printers dream.
And as for it being impossible to work in - I have made many forms in the program that work fantastic and are quite easy to complete. It’s just like any program though - the more you use it, the more you know about it - the easier it becomes to use.
That’s just my opinion… **
Yes, Acrobat was made for print, and yes, it’s a printer’s dream. I agree with that. However, it’s a web developer’s nightmare. And the thing that worries me is that it’s becoming a standard for web usage. I work with PDFs all the time, and we have to prepare documents that are designed both for print and web usage. Here are some of the things that are INCREDIBLY annoying about Acrobat.
-
It’s not well documented - There SO many features in acrobat that are simply not well documented enough. But there are MORE bugs out there that Adobe hasn’t fixed that they could at least tell web developers about, but they havent.
-
Making a streaming pdf crashes a computer half the time - Adobe came out with this idea that users should see each page of a document as it loads, meaning that you can see the first page of a document before the second loads. Before it used to be that the whole document would have to load before it displayed, and the fact that it took a long time caused some users to think that their computer had crashed, when it hadn’t. Streaming PDFs though, are incredibly buggy with the browser plug in, to the point that many people actually put on their pages “it is recommended that you save this file.” So there’s no point to streaming PDF.
-
It randomly embeds fonts - Whenever one creates a textbox in Acrobat, it will, at random, embed the font. (but of course, you can change that afterwards) Embedding the font it’s not such a bad thing, since a font only takes about 150k or so. However, if you’re using different SIZES of the same font, lets say Verdana 6 and Verdana 8, it will embed the font twice, when it clearly doesn’t have to. This font embedding can make a 200K PDF file increase to 970K. If you look at the size report on a file like that, you can see that that about 78 percent of the file is embedded fonts. Even if you do a File> Save As… which will clean up the file, the embedded fonts will remain. If you want to get rid of them, you will have to click on each textbox to see which ones have the randomly embedded font, and take it out…
-
It’s NOT designed as a document creation tool. While it is possible to create text and shapes in Acrobat, it is not intended for editing - and many people make the mistake of believing this. If you ever read why Acrobat was made in the first place, it was so that postcript files could be touched up. Later on Adobe came out with the PDF format, but Acrobat still remained a touch up tool. Acrobat is incredibly inferior to other applications, such as Microsoft Word. As a matter of fact, when you want to edit things like the angular orientation of text, Acrobat sends you to illustrator. PDF documents are meant to be created in a powerful editor, then distilled, then touched up using Acrobat.
-
This is the bug that gets me the most. If you use the text touch up tool in Acrobat, and do Control+click anywhere on the document, you can create a new text box. Then you start typing, and it will create a text object. However, after you created your document, if you use the text touch up tool again, you will notice that your text object is made up of several textboxes. Many of them overlapping. This is not particularly important for layout purposes, but it’s important for this next thing:
-
508 Compliance. 508 is the Disabilities Act. In this act the US government mandated that electronic documents have to accessible to disabled people. Meaning, they have to be accessible to blind people. To comply with 508, Adobe released the Make Accessible patch. This is one of the worst documented pieces of software I’ve ever seen. The Make Accessible patch includes two tools - the tag creator, and the Check Accessibility tool. Blind people have access to documents mostly through the use of screen readers. The tags in an accesible PDF are intended so that the screen reader will know what to say when it comes to an object in a PDF file. Without these tags, the reader has no access to the content of the document. Well, the problem is that when one creates the tags, they’re all wrong - completely out of order. If you have tables on your form, for example, the tags won’t follow the natural flow of the table. And that’s if you made it in Word. If you make it from scratch in Acrobat, the tags will treat the table as a whole object - which means the screen reader won’t have access to the content. Also, once you made the tags, forget about editing your document in Illustrator. Exporting elements to illustrator and bringing them back will completely screw up the tags, and create elements that acrobat will display, but not recognize - and there’s no way of fixing that. Once you screwed up, you HAVE to start all over.
Also, an accessible document has to be well structured. And structure is something that Acrobat does not let you edit. It will let you edit the order of the elements with the order touch up tool, but that’s a different thing from the structure. You can check the structure by hitting the reflow button. This will completely screw up your file, but it will let you see how the document flows. However, this feature is buggy, and once you hit the reflow button, many times you won’t be able to go back.
And just a word about 508 compliance. If you’re a web developer that creates PDFs that will be on the web, and you don’t make it 508 compliant, you can get SUED. YOU wont get sued, but the owner of the content will, and that’s incredibly bad news for you. You ABSOLUTELY HAVE to make your PDFs accessible.
Anyways, that’s my rant. If you’re going to use PDFs for print, totally, go ahead (even then I have some reservations…). There are some things that I LOVE about Acrobat, such as the fact that you can stick in javascript into forms, etc. However, from a web developer standpoint, Acrobat is hell.
If I might say something, I think the PDF format is going to die though. With the use of XML, companies can create document standards that are incredibly easy to edit, and that can be rendered an AWESOME definition. It’s going to be like creating a pdf file using html, and you won’t have to worry about accessibility issues or anything. I have a feeling that Macromedia is soon going to create more competition for Adobe with an XML based print format. (You guys know that Adobe and Macromedia HATE each other, right?) If any of you guys ever used the OLD WordPerfect, you understand what I’m talking about.
hmmm… I’m not interested in the debate over the adobe reader stuff… so I’ll comment on the main purpose of this thread, you r biz cards: personally I dont like them - at all (not being harsh, just honest). If I was forced to pick I’d say #1. I agree with what people were saying about its simplicity making it look professional. But in no way (a least to me) did it show you as a professional designer (if that is not what they are for, than I dunno, I’d have to know what you are trying to do with them to give you a good opinion). Simple is good, but you have to incorporate your skills in that simplicity, I did not see that here. JMHO.
Peace
